A Land Imagined: Transsensorial States of Transmigration

This paper argues that in Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s feature film, A Land Imagined (2019), liminal states of in-betweenness and blurred subjectivities in the film embody and uncover the precarious positions that transnational migrant workers occupy in Singapore. I posit that the only way to “find” the missing construction worker from China who disappears suddenly from a land reclamation site early in the film is to traverse and transgress spaces as defined by physical, national, psychological, real and/or technological boundaries. It is only through the act of tracing and attending to transsensorial states of trance presented in and produced within and without the film can the disembodied “ghost” of the missing migrant worker be returned to his body and hence the materiality of the film. The audience is compelled to ethically examine the strong presence of transmigrant labour that is forced to pass as invisible or absent in nation-state Singapore.